I really appreciated Melissa’s fierce post on fashion earlier this week at Shakesville, wherein she pillories the industry for selling shame as much as clothes. She laments long-mothballed bridesmaid dresses and this recent shopping tribulation expedition:
We go to a plus-size store. Immediately upon entering, I feel overwhelmed and anxious. I hate shopping. I hate clothes. The entire process of shopping for clothes brings me perilously close to hating myself. So many of the clothes are cut in ways that don’t flatter my body, because they are designed to conceal it. I am reminded at every turn that I am meant to be ashamed of my fat body. We leave. We go to another plus-size store. Everything is too old for me. Iain says, “This is stuff for women twice your age.” He’s right. My anxiety increases. We leave. We go to another plus-size store. Everything is too young for me. Weirdly, it somehow still all feels the same—and I realize the three stores are all owned by the same company. …
I complain about the cuts of the clothes; I point out how the biggest sizes are the first gone; I grouse that the prints aren’t flattering to large bodies; I note the preponderance of empire waists and the lack of diversity in lengths and shapes of clothes, as if fat female bodies are all shaped the same, as if fat women shouldn’t even try to make their bodies look good. I’m trying to be analytical, to intellectualize what, precisely, about this experience is anxiety-provoking.
When we get to the car, despite my best efforts, I cry.
Melissa’s experiences are especially awful because of the extra shame reserved for fat women. But they illuminate more than just her personal struggles, because her quest for stylish, flattering “fat clothes” reveals the shopping experiences of women of many sizes – writ large. Despite having what you might call slender privilege, I too have cried in anger and shame. I’ve ranted about my frustration finding pants that fit. My latest foray into the pants department was fueled by a massive adrenaline/endorphin rush in the wake of a nasty medical test, and even so, I barely got past the first rack.
I just do not understand WTF anyone would need “tummy control” on size 2 or 4. And yet I saw just that at Target. Coldwater Creek, where I eventually found some stretchy, flattering jeans, markets the stretch as slenderizing. I do not require slenderizing. I require pants that are fitted enough to wear ‘em to work while still letting me breathe free. Big bonus points if they don’t give me a massive wedgie or make me look like I’m going as a Sexay Plumber for Halloween.
I’ve noticed that I’m a tad more neurotic – pinched, if you will – when I’m being squeezed by my clothes. But it’s not just the literal squeeze of recalcitrant flesh. It’s also the emotional squeeze that says our bodies are always shaped wrong no matter how hard we try. The squeeze is harsher on large women, but scarcely a woman escapes its clutches. Today the HuffPo made a fuss about Katie Holmes wearing a sheer shirt over a black bra …
… as if women didn’t routinely bare far more at the beach! I’m down with the bra and shirt, and I think this “article” proves that HuffPo deserves an award for Baseless Titillation. It might be hilarious if it weren’t so routine and mind-meltingly stupid.
There is a problem with Holmes’ outfit, though. While it likely cost her thousands, it still hasn’t stopped putting the squeeze on her. The elastic waist is constricting enough to make even an actress with a presumed personal trainer look, well, lumpy. The ruffles don’t help one bit.
To be clear: I’m not criticizing Holmes (except for her religion and choice of husband, ’nuff said). I’m criticizing a fashion industry that manages to relegate even the richest and thinnest women to a fashion lumpy-proletariat. The logic of the system dictates that it will penalize poorer and larger women far more harshly. But no one gets away scot-free, not even the size twos.
So is tummy control – camouflage – ever okay? Well, I’m not much interested in camouflaging my figure flaws. Nor am I eager to dress my little boys in camo before they have any idea about what military service can mean. But yes, there may be a time and a place for camouflage … it just requires us to love our butts and bellies and, well, chill out. Then again, if you’ve evolved such a zen approach to your body, you’re probably already wearing a perfectly fitted, always stylish fur coat …
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
I can’t figure out who they are making clothes FOR. I’m slightly above average height, and slightly “underweight according to BMI.” My body hasn’t changed in years, I’ve been shopping the same stores, and yet my size keeps getting smaller. I’m pretty sure I will soon be sized out of pants entirely. I can’t find a single pair of boots that wouldn’t flap futilely around my calves. I’m to the point that “extended calf sizes” which seem to be available everywhere, make me slightly ragey, because there’s no special chicken leg sizes. And yet rationally I know that women on the other end of the size spectrum experience at least as much frustration as I do shopping, usually more. And going shopping with my VERY short mother is an exercise in extreme frustration, because clothes are either ridiculously large on her, or cut in the strange boxy shapes characteristic of “petite” sections.
And none of those frustrations have anything to do with the every day shaming we get about our bodies. Fashion wants to sell us things. To get us to buy new things we have to be convinced that we aren’t happy, satisfied, successful with what we have. The best way to do that is to make us feel bad about ourselves. It’s almost enough to make me want to learn to sew. Just so I won’t be feeding into the icky machine.
I guess our problem is partly the demise of tailors and seamstresses – they do exist but aren’t part of the average middle-class budgets, let alone in reach of poorer people. But to be a really good seamstress takes either more work or talent than I’ve been able to muster, and I do know how to sew passably well. Fitting clothes is nonetheless tricky, and retrofitting them is even harder.
I’ve noticed, too, that sizing has changed over the years. I wear a considerably “smaller” size now than I did 30 years ago in high school (oy, that’s a big number) but weigh about the same as I did back then. The standard, ready-to-wear sizes have shifted.
On the face of it, I would expect the fashion industry to be trying to sell consumers things which would present them at their best, with all the aesthetic assumptions implicit in “best”. But “you should be ashamed of yourself” seems to be a much easier marketing button to push, and I have trouble understanding why.
As a totally blind male, it’s not perhaps surprising that the whole business of fashion, (business in both senses), is perplexing and sad. A celebration of our best should be a perfectly good marketing strategy. But the industry has apparently decided that anxiety and guilt in its customers are much more easily and cheaply accessed. Sight is not the problem, it’s what you do with it.
When I started thinking about the difference between seeing and not seeing, I used to think of all the objective reality I was missing, until I started listening to different people describing the same thing. It seems to me that women could talk of subjectification of their bodies as every bit as pernicious as objectification. I don’t know why it’s so easy to trigger this insecurity in people. Certainly it would seem to me that dysmorphia is the real pandemic. As in “Who told thee that thou wast naked?”, a whole society appears to have been duped into accepting some idealised body type, not because they might aspire to it, but because they can never achieve it.
You don’t need a blind man to tell you your mirror may be lying to you, but it might just be true.
Reg, this is so interesting that it really deserves a wider audience! While I don’t think that being visually oriented, as a species, is the problem in itself, your perspective really illuminates (so to speak) how the visual can be used as a tool of oppression, and how the whole framework shifts radically when you take vision out of the picture (to use yet another visual metaphor).
I had similar experiences shopping for jeans just the other day. I could not find the cut I prefer (mid-rise, not low rise, with straight legs that are NOT skinny jeans) I wanted without that damned slenderizing tummy control panel built-in. If I cared about that, wouldn’t I just wear a girdle with everything?
Plus, I’m shopping for a larger size than I wore a year ago, and I cannot understand why clothing manufacturers presume that because my ass is wider, I am four inches taller.
After four stores, I gave up and bought another pair of yoga pants instead.
I thought the girdle had died around 1970, but no, it has just come back in other guises – “tummy control” and “body shapers.” And then there’s Spanx, which is far more confining than anything my mother wore back in the 1960s!
Conversely, I’ve lost some weight over the past few years, and I am now having wore trouble than ever finding pants with a rise that fits. It’s not so much the pant legs that are the problem, but the wedgie effect as you go down a size or two. Maybe that’s just me but it’s really irksome.
“Spanx”?
Good grief, the Internet is rapidly overtaking the BBC as my principal source of information.
Sungold, I recently found some great pants. They are Gloria Vanderbilt brand, the model name is “Amanda”, and they were stocked with the jeans and khakis at JCPenney. The style is somewhere between jeans and khakis, a good workplace casual look. They have a waist that sits at my waist, without binding painfully at the center of the crotch. They don’t have the mom-jean elastic waist, just a normal flat waist, but for once it doesn’t gap in the back. They come in short/medium/long lengths, and the longs were actually long enough. I bought a pair, brought them home, laundered and dried them, and tried them on again. Washing and drying didn’t turn them into instant flood pants! OMG!
So I went straight out to the JCPenney’s website and ordered two more pairs. On the website, they even had all the colors available in my size, unlike the store where my size had been sold out in most colors. I’m tempted to order even more, stock up, since who knows when I’ll find normal pants again?
For reference, I am 5’11″ and have had some ups and downs with my weight. At every weight, though, when I compare my measurements to the charts, my hips are between one and two sizes larger than my waist.
“fashion lump-proletariat”???!!! You rawk!
And I got that wrong – sorry.
You rawk, too, my dear! (Unlike me, who has taken nearly two weeks to reply to your comments!)